AthleticOffice Now in the Big Ten with Launch of Indiana Website

10.15.14

Hoosiers Football has a new home at WinTodayIU.com

With the launch of our latest team website, WinTodayIU.com, AthleticOffice is proud to announce that we now host the online home of Indiana Hoosiers Football. A lot of hard work went into creating the website and I wanted to touch on a few things from the experience, as well as show some of the cool stuff we've been working on. I also wanted to thank Jeff Sims and our good friend Coach Ryan McInerney for making this thing happen.

Being different can be tough. Really tough… especially in an industry that doesn't necessarily welcome change with open arms. But when we began doing team websites, we knew only one thing: we wanted to be DIFFERENT. While doing research we found that not only did most sites lack functionality, they also lacked any real content. Having graphics and music thrown in your face seems cool… for about 7 seconds. But why even have a website? Couldn't you have just made a cool video and gotten your point across? With that in mind, we decided to go against the grain and focus more on detail, functionality, and content.

What we realized is the balance between providing those things while still looking "cool" is quite difficult. What we strive to create is a product that can still generate the "oohs and ahhhs", but also serve a purpose. When the intro song, in-your-face graphics, and fireworks show is over... do you have anything else to offer? Well, we think we do.

We could have taken the easy way… we could have taken the music and pyrotechnics route and played it safe. Not everyone will agree with our philosophy. Not everyone will appreciate the detail and thought that goes into our work. Not everyone will even like our work. But we're ok with that. We will continue to do what we believe in: put our heart and soul into what we do and try to provide people with the best product possible. We're honored to be working with Indiana and excited for the future of AthleticOffice.

-Blake E. Smith II (Minister of Propaganda)

A look at one of the cool features we recently developed for Indiana that will soon be available on all of our team sites:

Social Hub Application

People have been displaying their latest tweets and Instagram photos on their websites for a long time but the typical method isn't effective. Most of the large social networks provide a simple way to embed content so that even people with very limited knowledge can utilize them on their websites. However, it's not very functional and you have limited control over the way it looks and the way it works. Our solution was to develop what we call our "#SocialHub", which is an application that brings in all your posts from various social networks, mixes them together, and displays them in a way that looks great and enhances interaction. The idea is that social networks, not typical news stories, would provide the main content and up-to-the minute news stories for our websites. We certainly didn't invent the idea of social media aggregation but we are providing something to teams that would otherwise be extremely expensive and difficult to use.